malvasia bianca

I recently played through Loom along with the Vintage Game Club, and I wished I had more to say about it. It’s a point-and-click adventure game; instead of accumulating an inventory of items to use, however, you accumulate an inventory of tunes. Which is a pleasant change of pace, and helped make the puzzle solutions be less arbitrary: there’s not as much “find the key to use here”, or “find the completely arbitrary object to use here” as in other adventure games, instead each tune has a function, you can generally figure out which tune to invoke to do what you want in a given situation, and there are tunes that are used in multiple situations and even puzzles that allow multiple solutions.

Having said that, it’s still an adventure game. So yes, you will get stuck at times; sometimes you’ll feel like it’s your fault, but not infrequently the environments were hard to navigate, and there were some crucial item interactions that I missed where the game could have helped me more. It has more of a plot than a lot of early adventure games (though, to be honest, I’m actually not that familiar with graphical adventure games), but the plot ended up disappointing me more and more as the game progressed, and KAOS Chaos was just ridiculous.

It’s a short game; these days, that’s normally a good sign for me, except that it didn’t feel like the sort of short game where every part had its place and there was nothing more to add without being superfluous. Instead, it felt like it was a bit rushed, like they didn’t have time to polish it. So, while its length wasn’t an active negative (I’d rather have an unpolished short game than an unpolished long one!), it also wasn’t an active positive.

A pleasant enough way to have spent a few hours and a few dollars; I’d just hoped for more.